A battle without end

Even in a city numbed by violence, the surveillance tape was blood-curdling: three men, lying in wait at an open-air carwash on Louisiana Avenue, springing toward their targets with assault rifles, then calmly unleashing a hail of bullets at the unsuspecting victims.

Frozen in time, video images from the July 26 shooting document brutality of a type that regularly places New Orleans among the most violent cities in America. Amazingly, the two victims survived their wounds. Even more amazingly -- given the planning and precision of the attack -- the men weren't intended to be victims at all. The shooting was a case of mistaken identity.

"It was retaliation," Lt. Christy Williams of the 6th Police District said, "but they retaliated against the wrong people."

It was an easy case for detectives to put together. Less than 24 hours earlier, Le'Devin Pearson, 22, was the victim of a drive-by shooting in which six men in a truck opened fire with an arsenal that included an AK-47, a .45-caliber pistol and a 9 mm semiautomatic. One of the men who watched Pearson die, 21-year-old Elton Hooks, is awaiting trial on a charge of attempted murder in the carwash ambush. Pearson was like a brother to Hooks and, according to police, Hooks and two other suspects mistakenly thought they had cornered Pearson's killers.

But people in the Calliope, formally known as the B.W. Cooper public housing complex, didn't see the shootings as bookends in a 24-hour feud. Instead, they were only the latest twists in a years-long cycle of drug-fueled killings and retribution that has made the neighborhood one of the city's bloodiest.

"Elton went to the carwash because he just couldn't take it anymore. He flipped out," said Wilhemina "Mama" Cole, conceding that the crystal-clear videotape implicates her great-grandson.

In the previous 18 months, Hooks had lost his father, Alexis "Slam" Williams; his cousin, Raynell "Rico" Cole; and another friend, Pearson's younger brother, Le'Var Pearson -- all gunned down in the grass-and-dirt courtyards of Calliope. Before his death, Williams had been identified by police as the triggerman in a previous Calliope killing, although he was never charged.

"It all runs back and forth and ties together. It's a never-ending battle," said New Orleans Police Capt. Anthony Cannatella, commander of the 6th District, which includes the housing development.

Spark of death spree

Certainly, some of the Calliope killings -- 88 in the past 10 years -- are isolated incidents, springing from petty arguments, a fight over a woman or a domestic dispute turned deadly. But in a city where police chalk up three out of every four murders to narcotics, the tit-for-tat in the Calliope is painfully easy to follow.

Many people say it started in 1987, when the first shot fired in the Calliope's drug wars claimed a man named Sam "Scully" Clay.

Some people remember Clay for his generosity. Others remember him for his flashy wardrobe and his way with women. Most people, though, remember him as the neighborhood's first drug kingpin of the crack cocaine era and, from the moment the blood began pooling under his head on a Calliope sidewalk, as its first high-profile casualty.

To people outside the neighborhood, it was just another killing. But within the complex, Clay's execution-style rubout was the beginning of a long trail of murder that has sent dozens of young men to early graves and dozens more to prison.

Longtime residents can trace the offshoots of Clay's killing to subsequent Calliope murders, and those murders to even more recent murders, including some of the six killings that took place in the complex in 2003. In the Le'Devin Pearson slaying, Darryl Clay, a nephew of Scully Clay, was one of three men booked with second-degree murder. The suspects were released in September when witnesses got cold feet.

"It's the same groups of people doing the same killing, over and over," Cole said.

Like genealogists studying a family tree, authorities have come to see how the Clay drug gang begat the Glenn Metz gang, which begat the Richard Pena gang, which begat the gang allegedly run by Derrick "Eyes" Washington. Authorities now await another generation of slayings after August's federal indictment of Washington and 10 co-defendants in a string of four murders and three shootings tied to cocaine trafficking.

One of the defendants in that case came under suspicion in a March 2 Calliope murder before he could be arrested by the feds: Terrance Benjamin, 25, is still considered by the New Orleans Police Department to be a top suspect in the assault rifle killing of 24-year-old Ray Miner.

With the Washington group off the street, police say they have had no trouble identifying the two rival groups that have stepped in to fill the vacuum. One of them, known as the 3 'n' G -- named for the intersection of Third and Galvez streets -- earned supremacy by wiping out their biggest rivals, the Porch Boyz, said Sgt. Terry Wilson, 6th District narcotics commander. But Wilson said 3 'n' G is now getting stiff competition from an upper-level West Bank dealer with extensive ties in the Calliope.

"Right now you have those two factions both trying to take over the business," Wilson said. "If you go there in the morning you can see the two groups lining up on opposite sides of the courtyard to make their sales" of crack and heroin.

Familiar territory

When it comes to the Calliope drug market, few people have followed the bloodshed more closely than Charlie Smith. As an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Smith has pieced it together through guns and drugs and informants and wiretaps and, in some cases, friends from his childhood in the development on South Johnson Street.

"If you follow these guys long enough, everything ties together: the shootings, the killings, the drug deals. It's like they're all caught in this bubble of poverty and hopelessness and they can't help stepping on top of each other," Smith said.

With his shaved head and the diamond stud in his ear, Smith glides easily through his old neighborhood, a place where he was nearly sucked into the subculture that claimed many of his buddies.

Smith was 14 when he decided he had to have a pair of $40 Dr. J sneakers. His mother was raising four children by herself and couldn't afford such a luxury, so Smith decided to take a shortcut. He asked a drug-dealing buddy known as "Soul," a Clay underling, whether he needed any help selling weed. The next day, Clay pulled up to Smith in a car and told him to get in.

"If I hear anything about you selling drugs or even talking about it," Smith quoted Clay as saying, "I'm going to put a serious whupping on you."

Clay offered an incentive. Even though Clay was several years older, he knew Smith was a budding defensive star on the Booker T. Washington High School football team. So he told Smith he would give him $10 for every sack he made in the upcoming season.

"Listen, man, you have a way out of here and that's sports," Clay told him. "Me, I'm stuck. Either I'm going to die before I'm 40 or I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail."

Before he let Smith go, Clay popped the trunk and pulled out a brand new pair of Dr. J's. That was in 1979. Less than 10 years later, Clay was dead. He was 34.

"Most people don't realize he had a good side," Smith said. "There's no doubt in my mind that without people like Scully who hit me over the head and told me I could have a different life, that I never would have escaped that world."

Eventually, Smith became "Big Charlie C," an all-state nose tackle, good enough for a scholarship to Southern University and, four years later, an invitation to training camp with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. When his football career ended, he turned to law enforcement, working as an undercover gang expert for the ATF.

Trapped in Calliope

As a federal agent, Smith is privy to piles of intelligence about New Orleans narcotics gangs and their turf battles. He has helped draw up organizational charts showing who has killed whom and why: Drug dealers snuffed out by rival drug dealers. Witnesses murdered before they could testify. Revenge killings to answer previous revenge killings.

It's a job that requires a certain professional detachment, but when someone is murdered in Calliope, Smith's heart skips a beat. First, he looks for the name, to see whether it's somebody he knows. More likely these days, now that he's pushing 40, the victim is a nephew or a cousin or even the teenage son of somebody from Smith's old crowd.

"When I see some of these guys who are killed, I see the guys I flied kites with and played marbles with and built go-carts with. When I go to their funerals, I still see the little kid who spent the night at my house," he said.

Smith reels off some of the names of the dead and the jailed.

There's Gennero "Meatball" Arthur, the former classmate who got his nickname from Smith after he showed up at school with an especially bad haircut. Authorities have long considered Arthur the primary suspect in Scully Clay's murder, although, officially, the case remains unsolved. Later, Arthur was convicted of several other killings as a Metz gang enforcer and is serving a life sentence.

"He was a little guy, too small for sports, so he got himself a 9 mm (pistol) and suddenly everyone respected him," Smith said. "At least he thought it was respect. Actually, it was fear. He got his start by robbing dice games."

There's Levi Johnigan, whose bullet-riddled body was dumped on the emergency room ramp of Charity Hospital in November 1995. Johnigan, a younger acquaintance of Smith's, had survived a previous shooting and emerged as one of the few core players to survive the Clay-Metz feud. But retribution in the Calliope, Smith said, has no expiration date.

Then there's Johnell "Joint" Jones, another classmate of Smith's, who was still slinging drugs when he was gunned down in Calliope in March 2000, one of five murders there in a violent two-week period.

"Whenever I have a chance," Smith said, "I reach out to these guys. I tell them, 'You're not going to escape the web unless you make a clean break and get out of here, get out of New Orleans.' But they hardly ever listen. And look what happens."

'Nobody can answer why'

Not even a long stretch in prison provides immunity from the violence.

Ernest Marrero was 16 when he was convicted on drug charges in 1991 along with another Metz gang enforcer, Gerald "Nap" Elwood. Elwood, now serving a life sentence, used to ride with "Meatball" Arthur in an armor-plated pickup truck with the word "Homicide" emblazoned on the hood. Marrero might have hooked up with a bad crowd, but he decided to cut his losses after he was arrested, so he pleaded guilty and received a 10-year prison sentence.

When he got out of prison in spring 2001, Marrero appeared to live a clean life: working full time, spending time with his family, keeping a low profile. But on Dec. 7, 2002, he was fatally shot while sitting in a car on South Rocheblave Street, smack in the middle of Calliope.

"The thing that continues to haunt me is that nobody can answer why," said Yvonne Marrero, Ernest's mother and president of the B.W. Cooper Resident Management Corp. "Ever since he got out of prison, he worked, he volunteered in community outreach, he was starting his own janitorial business. Some people are saying that because he was so clean, somebody thought he must be a snitch," a police informant.

To Norman Taylor, a former New Orleans patrol officer who now works as a community liaison between the housing development's residents council and the NOPD, Marrero's death is proof that the bad guys still have the upper hand.

"Here was a person who learned from his mistakes and was becoming a shining star," Taylor said. "To see him snuffed out like that really was a blow to the whole development."

Taylor, who was a community policing officer in Calliope during his NOPD days, said the recipe for murder in the housing development is not different from other impoverished urban areas. Dismal schools, substandard housing and fractured families lead to poor job prospects, tempting youngsters to deal drugs for fast money. For children already desensitized to gun violence and surrounded by poor role models, the combination is flammable.

"Stay too close to the fire, and you'll get burned," Taylor said. "For these kids, violence just becomes a way of life. They don't know any different. All they see when they look up to these drug dealers is that they're driving around in Hummers and wearing all the fancy clothes."

No easy task for police

New Orleans police officers, the front line defense against street violence, generally admit they are fighting an uphill battle. Cannatella, who took command of the 6th District in December 2002, said: "Let's face it, it's tempting. You've got a 15-year-old kid with no job, he can't read, he doesn't go to school -- but if he works for the neighborhood drug dealer, he's got $500 in his pocket."

Cannatella said good street intelligence is crucial in disrupting the cycle of drugs and violence, especially in an insulated community like Calliope where most people know what their neighbors are up to. When he took over the district, Cannatella said the first order he gave his narcotics detectives was to identify the major dealers. The second, he said, was to identify the minor dealers. The third was to take as many off the street as possible.

"The thinking is that if we take out the varsity and the junior varsity, the pee wee league won't have anyone to emulate," Cannatella said.

To make sure the message is delivered, Cannatella said he strives to make every drug bust a public spectacle, rolling out a large police van and making arrests during peak times of the day.

"These kids see the diamonds, the women, the flashy clothes," Cannatella said, "But I want the kids to see that it's not all this flash and glory for a drug dealer. I want them to see the harsh reality. That's why I try to tear them down socially as well as arresting them physically by rolling out the paddy wagon."

Justice in one fell swoop

Federal law enforcement agencies, like the ATF and FBI, have tried to supplement local police efforts by conducting lengthy investigations, sometimes spanning several years, to take out entire drug gangs in one big sweep. Their targets aren't simply drug organizations, but drug organizations that incorporate killing into their business plans. That was the approach that dismantled the Metz and Pena gangs in the mid-1990s.

Glenn Metz was known as a dime-bag weed dealer before he hooked up with Arthur and Elwood, fearless killers who paved the way for Metz to take over the Calliope drug market. At Metz's trial, prosecutors showed that at its peak, the gang bought cocaine directly from cartel-level connections in Houston.

Richard Pena was even bigger, law enforcement officials said. When convictions took Metz and his accomplices out of circulation, Pena filled the vacuum, using his Latin American roots to cultivate big-league drug suppliers in Houston, Miami and Mexico. Although he was an outsider, Pena recruited local distributors in Calliope and other public housing developments, in some cases helping them launder their profits through a series of rap music labels he incorporated. For protection, Pena placed veteran New Orleans police officer David Singleton on his payroll. The Pena gang was responsible for more than 20 killings, prosecutors said, including several in Calliope.

In the Washington case, the indictment of 11 men came after a yearlong probe under ATF's Project Safe Neighborhoods program. Smith and local ATF chief Mark Chait say agents tried to forge a partnership with residents, recruiting more than three dozen informants, relocating key witnesses and visiting the neighborhood frequently enough to become fixtures.

Even so, the reluctance of witnesses was daunting. In New Orleans, in fact, fearful witnesses are the most common reason murder cases go unprosecuted. To fight the problem, Smith said he tries to gain the confidence of witnesses by using a simple code of the streets: If you do something to one of mine, I'm going to do something to one of yours. It's called revenge. To turn the credo into a police tool, Smith said he tries to convince people that testifying against a killer is a legitimate form of payback.

"We worked with witnesses over a long period of time," Smith said. "You have to get them to understand that testifying can be revenge. You have to teach the community a new way of thinking. Unless you can get the people to buy into that, it's like putting Band-Aids on a gunshot wound."

That kind of police presence is certainly needed, Marrero and Taylor said, but arrests and convictions provide only a temporary fix.

"When law enforcement comes in with a big sweep and then backs off, they're really just plowing fertile ground. You don't pull weeds without planting something positive," Taylor said.

As Marrero put it: "We can't just tell these kids, 'Just say no to drugs.' We have to give them things to say yes to."

Hard cycle to clip

Earl Barconey Sr. knows how difficult it is for law enforcement to stop the bleeding.

Barconey is a Baptist minister and a longtime deputy with the Orleans Parish Civil Sheriff's Office. He has lived in Calliope most of his life. And he has buried two sons who were killed there: Randall Watts in 1997 and Earl Pierre Barconey in 1998.

"The street has a lot of say-so over your children. You do what you can for them, but you can't control them," Barconey said. "If you look into what's in their head, half of these kids don't care whether they live or die."

Watts, a charismatic figure known around the neighborhood as "Calliope Slim," was a Pena associate and, allegedly, a hired killer. At the time he was fatally shot in a Thalia Street courtyard, Watts allegedly was on his way to carry out a murder contract for the gang. His funeral included a raucous second-line in which his casket was hoisted in the air by a throng of pallbearers and paraded through the legendary Rose Tavern at Thalia and Dorgenois streets. A mural depicting Watts with angel wings now adorns an exterior wall of the bar, just steps from where he was murdered.

Watts' younger brother, Troy Watts, was as low-key as Calliope Slim was flamboyant. When the younger Watts, nicknamed "T-Dub," pleaded guilty to selling cocaine for Pena, hardly anybody noticed. When he served five years in federal prison, few people knew he was gone.

Troy Watts, 29, was freed earlier this year, and when he returned to Calliope, he found an altered landscape. The Pena gang had long been dismantled, two of his brothers had been killed, many of his old associates were in prison. He vowed to go straight and made plans to open a sweet shop with another brother.

Even so, his father pulled him aside for a lecture, a talk he had given all of his sons many times before.

"You have three options," Barconey told his son. "You can get swallowed up by the streets. You can get caught by the law. Or you can quit."

According to police, Watts didn't heed the warning.

On Oct. 1, he was booked with attempted second-degree murder after a shooting near his home. Police said Watts and an accomplice, Joshua Small, 17, calmly walked up to a 30-year-old man sitting on a porch. Believing the man to be a police informant, Watts allegedly yelled, "I don't want to see your face around here," before firing at the man's feet, presumably as a warning. The man wasn't hit, but a bystander was shot in the arm by a stray bullet.

Watts surrendered the day after the shooting. Small remained at large for two months, but allegedly surfaced on Dec. 1 when the 30-year-old targeted two months earlier found himself again at the wrong end of a gun. This time, he was hit four times and severely wounded. Police arrested Small two days later and accused him of trying to finish the job he and Watts had started.